Weak in the Knees

Mar 20, 2024

Some people have voracious appetites for experience. They want to go everywhere, see everything, mix and match and mingle. I am not so inclined. I want to face the barrage of incoming with a discerning eye so that I can make wise choices that feel nourishing to my soul, leaving most of it by the side of the road. I watch myself clicking away on the life remote that presents endless possibilities, so much more than I can absorb. This is true of entertainments that offer themselves to me on the screen, as well as words on the page. So many words. Sometimes I pray in vain that the words will stop. I read a lot of material in The New Yorker and The Atlantic, particularly about Israel/Palestine and the threat to free speech. By the time I wade through all the catastrophes, I find lately that I don’t have much mental space remaining for literary fiction which has always sustained me. I want to read Jonathan Lethem’s book Dissident Gardens about old lefties in Queens. I want to go back and read Pale Fire to see whether I was right about how good it is when I read it in college. You have to be luxuriantly spacious to read these books. You have to have a profligate love for them and roll around in the grass clutching them tightly. And you have to get past the fact that they’re written by white men. Am I really supposed to deprive myself of Nabokov? Life is short, my new mantra.

person's feet — Photo by Lucrezia Carnelos on Unsplash

That may be a cliche, but I find that it cuts to the chase and applies to people as well as art. There are a range of qualities in friends or potential friends that I appreciate. Humor, dependability, the capacity to appreciate being alive while witnessing the ambient tragedy. But nothing is as determinative when I consider whether to spend time with someone as the answer to this question: Does this person have a clue that other people exist or is this person so totally self-involved that when they look out into the world they see only replicas of themselves? My observation is that people can be self-preoccupied in a variety of ways. Some people will stare right at you and talk about their accomplishments until you are driven out of the room. Some people tend to go for the six-degrees-of-separation approach, regaling you with stories about Neil Young’s second cousin who they once saw on the bus. Then there are people who come at it from the opposite direction, sucking all the oxygen out of the room by suggesting that their suffering is of a different order of magnitude from your suffering. Given a choice, I prefer to sing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” on FaceTime with my sister on her 89th birthday. Two old Jews singing about the glory of the lord.

If you are 78 years old as I am, self-involved people are not the folks you want to hang with. Not just because it’s lonely out there when people don’t recognize your personhood, but because other people who have an enhanced gift for presence and compassion may just be wanting to pass it along to you, the train ticket to paradise. They always have something more to offer and they always want you to have it. Generosity of spirit comes easily to them, or at least that’s the impression they give. It could be that what you’re witnessing is the end result of decades of reflection. Whatever the process, an encounter with this kind of person often leaves me tearful or weak in the knees. Idiomatically, I am so powerfully affected that it’s difficult to remain standing.

I hadn’t spent much time thinking about that expression until it started happening to me more directly, without the benefit of metaphor. Sometimes when I get out of the car after sitting for a while, my legs feel gelatinous, as if there are no bones or muscles, just sea waves between my hips and my feet. I search for solidity…. the roof of the car I’m leaning on to support myself, the paved road undulating beneath my feet, a person who is kind enough to give me a hand. It’s as if my legs haven’t caught up with my imagination. I think I want to walk but my body is reserving judgment. I haven’t gotten a handle on this yet but the experience is disquieting. It’s a disruption of my illusion of control, an invasion of Otherness breaching the tight borders of who I think I am, what I think I know about myself. But then, the heart is inclined to be more open, more spacious and curious when the body is unsettled. The older I get, the more the one-two punch of vulnerability and love makes me feel indeed weak in the knees. I want to be with people who see me, recognize me and are willing to extend a hand when I seem wobbly, even if they’re far away. We will shuffle into paradise together when we share a willingness to do that for each other.

seventysomething

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